“When they pull, so do we” E-mail from Julian Assange to John Young, January 7, 2007, available at http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm
thirty times the size of every text article stored on Wikipedia Wikipedia: Database download, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
“let it flower into something new” Julian Assange to John Young, January 7, 2007, available at http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm
spreading free software like a hacker Johnny Appleseed Jacob Appelbaum. “Personal experiences bringing technology and new media to disaster areas.” Speech at the Chaos Communication Congress, December 2005, available here: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/478.en.html
“As an American, I found myself feeling pretty awful about what we’d contributed to” Ibid.
grabbed the remote, turned up the volume, and refused to change the channel Ibid.
A man beaten in the shower. Nightly curfews, women raped. Xeni Jardin interview with Jacob Appelbaum. “Katrina: ‘Rape, murder, beatings’ in Astrodome, say evacuees.” BoingBoing.net, September 7, 2005.
“The same thing, over and over again. The disconnection. The lack of humanity.” Jacob Appelbaum. “Personal experiences bringing technology and new media to disaster areas.”

…

JULF HELSINGIUS
Finnish systems administrator and privacy advocate, Helsingius created the Penet anonymous remailer and faced legal pressure from the Church of Scientology that demanded he turn over the identity of one of his users.
JIM BELL
Engineer and libertarian whose 1997 essay “Assassination Politics” described a system of using encryption to facilitate anonymous, untraceable, and crowd-funded contract killings.
JACOB APPELBAUM
Activist, hacker, and developer for the Tor anonymity network who befriended Julian Assange and became the WikiLeaks’ primary American associate.
PAUL SYVERSON
Logician and cryptographer in the Naval Research Laboratory who is credited with inventing the anonymous communications protocol known as “onion routing.”
NICK MATHEWSON AND ROGER DINGLEDINE
Two MIT researchers who worked with Syverson to develop onion routing into a usable tool and then a nonprofit known as the Tor Project.

…

And he points out that the message may have also been a honey trap designed to ensnare him and put him in prison.
But more frankly, May says, he simply didn’t care. He was, and remains, a hard-core libertarian looking out for his own Randian self-interest, not a whistleblower advocate trying to expose corruption. “I’m not concerned about things like that. Let the Africans kill each other,” he says flatly. “I don’t have those kinds of political interests.”
When I later ask Jacob Appelbaum, one of the only Americans to associate openly with WikiLeaks, about his thoughts on BlackNet, he sees things more simply. “Tim May is a fucking racist,” he says. “And it’s really a shame. Because if he weren’t, he could have created WikiLeaks himself and made a real difference in the world.”
When I repeat Appelbaum’s comment to May, he chuckles. “I call ’em as I see ’em,” he says. “If I see blacks driving themselves into the gutter, I call it as it is.”

But so far their efforts to reform the law have not been successful.
The few instances where we have learned that companies fought government surveillance have not ended well. Consider just two cases—a small Internet provider, Sonic.net, and Internet giant Yahoo!. In 2011, Sonic.net went public with the fact that it had fought—and lost—a secret court order demanding the e-mail addresses of people who had corresponded with a WikiLeaks volunteer, Jacob Appelbaum, in the course of two years. Challenging the order was “rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do,” said Sonic’s chief executive, Dane Jasper. By speaking to me, Jasper was defying the court’s gag order that prevented him from discussing the government’s request. (Jasper later said that he was unaware that the gag order remained in force when he spoke to me.)
As for Yahoo!

…

All my transactions would haunt me forever, stalking me and informing the choices that were presented to me. And so, until I could find a better way, I was going to have to rely on Ida and my masked identities to settle my debts.
10
POCKET LITTER
I was standing under the world clock tower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, feeling nervous. I had just arrived in the city and had arranged to meet Jacob Appelbaum, the computer security researcher whose e-mail had been secretly investigated by the U.S. government after his involvement as a volunteer for WikiLeaks was publicly disclosed in 2010. But I didn’t have any way to get in touch with him—no cell phone number, no street address, nothing. I simply had to wait to see if he would show up at our planned meeting point.
I’d flown halfway around the world for this meeting.

…

To use Off-the-Record, I had to download three different software programs and then convince them to cooperate with one another. First, I used Tor’s anonymizing software to connect to the Internet. Then I signed up for a Jabber instant messaging account. Then I downloaded an instant messaging program called Adium that contains the Off-the-Record messaging protocol. Then I configured Adium to work with Tor and Jabber.
The only reason I was able to do any of this is because the computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum walked me through each step and told me where to click and what to type in the settings.
And yet this cobbled-together mash of free software was actually the state of the art for encrypted communications. I found that many of my sensitive journalistic sources would talk to me only over the combination of Tor, Jabber, and Off-the-Record messaging. For the most sensitive sources, actually, I sometimes used Tor, Jabber, and Off-the-Record on a clean computer that I had booted using a thumb drive containing The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) operating system.

As Assange shifted from school to school he was targeted by bullies as the outsider: “His only real saviour in life or his own bedrock in life was this computer. His mother, in fact, encouraged him to use this computer … It had become an addictive instrument to him at a very early age.” Galbally describes Assange as “super smart”; not a nerdy hacker but someone unusual and flamboyant.
Interestingly, some of the world’s most talented programmers come from broken families. Jacob Appelbaum, who would become WikiLeaks’ representative in the US, says he was the son of a paranoid schizophrenic mother and heroin addict father. He spent much of his boyhood in a children’s home. As a boy, he discovered a woman convulsing in his father’s bathroom with a needle sticking out of her arm. Appelbaum told Rolling Stone magazine that programming and hacking allowed him, however, “to feel like the world is not a lost place.

…

This uncompromising attitude appealed to Domscheit-Berg: “PRQ has a track record of being the hardest ISP you can find in the world. There’s just no one that bothers less about lawyers harassing them about content they’re hosting.”
WikiLeaks’ own laptops all have military-grade encryption: if seized, the data on them cannot be read, even directly off the disk. The volunteer WikiLeaks hacker, Seattle-based Jacob Appelbaum, boasts that he will destroy any laptop that has been let out of his sight, for fear that it might have been bugged. None of the team worries deeply about the consequences of losing a computer, though, because the lines of code to control the site are stored on remote computers under their control – “in the cloud” – and the passwords they need for access are in their heads.
Popular for day-by-day in-house conversations is the internet phone service Skype, which also uses encryption.

Western intelligence agencies also spied, albeit with fewer resources than the NSA. They worked closely with the US intelligence community, and had done so for decades. Germany’s domestic intelligence body, the BND, for example, shared information with Fort Meade including metadata and had even handed over copies of its two digital spy systems, Mira4 and Veras. Snowden himself flagged these close connections, telling the journalist and internet freedom activist Jacob Appelbaum that the NSA was ‘under the same roof’ as the Germans, and ‘most other western states’.
The extent of this collaboration could be confusing. One BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slide, shared by Greenwald with the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet, suggests the NSA is hoovering up 1.2 million Norwegian telephone calls daily. Norway’s military intelligence service, however, said the slide had been misread. It said Norway itself collected the calls from Afghanistan, and passed them on to Fort Meade.

…

He signed off: ‘I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us.
‘With my best regards
‘Edward Snowden’
Days later, Harrison said goodbye to Snowden and flew to Berlin. She had been with him in Moscow for four months. On what was said to be legal advice, she declined to return to the UK. The German capital and East Berlin in particular was now a hub for a growing number of Snowden exiles: Poitras, journalist Jacob Appelbaum and Harrison. For anyone with a sense of history this was ironic. Stasiland had become an island of media freedom.
Greenwald, meanwhile, announced his resignation from the Guardian to join a new media venture backed by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
What were Snowden’s prospects of exiting Moscow for a new life in western Europe? Left-leaning politicians, intellectuals and writers called on the German government to grant him asylum.

The Foucauldian disciplinary model describes a mode of spatial power predicated on the securing of subjects in place (securing a negative freedom of movement and a positive freedom from movement).
16. The problematics and potential of the urban operating system are well articulated by Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque in Urban Versioning System v.1.0, Situated Technologies Pamphlet series, 2008, http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/. The conflicts involved, however, are impossible to tally in real time. In their book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, and Andy Muller-Maguhn are alarmed that “Siemens is marketing a platform for intelligence agencies that does actually produce automated actions. So when target A is within a certain number of meters of target B according to their mobile intercept records, and target A receives an email mentioning something—a keyword—then an action is triggered.” For them the User-versus-Cloud arms race is tilted by the widespread use of cryptographic systems (including perhaps the Cryptophone, http://www.cryptophone.de/en/products/mobile/).

…

Katherine Harmon, “Undead-End: Fungus That Controls Zombie-Ants Has Own Fungal Stalker,” Scientific American, November 8, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zombie-ant-fungus-parasite/. The line, “animal living inside of animal living inside animal” is Ed Keller's.
III The Projects
The Stack to Come
Secrets are lies.
—The Circle, company policy1
Surveillance is theft.
—Writers against Mass Surveillance2
Autonomy is abstraction.
—Chris Anderson, 3D Robotics3
Convenience means not secure.
—Jacob Appelbaum, Tor project4
Fear is awareness.
—Charles Manson5
68. Seeing The Stack We Have, Stacks to Come
The Stack we have means: borderlines are rewritten, dashed, curved, erased, automated; algorithms count as continental divides; the opposition of chthonic versus geometric territory is collapsed by computation; interfaces upon interfaces accumulate into networks, which accumulate into territories, which accumulate into geoscapes (territories comprising territories, made and so entered into, not entered into and so made); the embedded is mobilized and the liquid is tethered down into shelter and infrastructure; the flat, looping planes of jurisdiction multiply and overlap into towered, interwoven stacks; the opaque is transcribed and the transparent is staged, dramatized, and artificialized; irregular allegiances are formalized (the enclave and exclave, for diasporic and satellite expatriates); both futurist and medievalist scenarios confiscate, one from another, the program of supercomputational utopias; and the incomplete(able) comprehensiveness of Earth's archives is folded back on itself as a promiscuous, ambient geopolitics of consumable electrons.

In the days after the State Department cables starting
leaking, not only did Senator Joe Lieberman intimidate major
Internet companies into kicking WikiLeaks oﬀ their services
without any serious review, the government told its own
employees that they shouldn’t look at references to WikiLeaks
from government computers or their home computers, and
even public resources like the Library of Congress started
ﬁltering searches on its computers and Wi-Fi to prevent people
from reading news articles about the cables.7 The Oﬃce of
Management and Budget circulated a fourteen-page memo
to all government agencies requiring them to tighten their
security procedures, which included suggestions that they
employ psychiatrists and sociologists to measure employee
“despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning
trustworthiness,” “capture evidence of pre-employment and/
or post-employment activities or participation in on-line
media data mining sites like WikiLeaks or Open Leaks,” and
require all employees to report their contacts with the media.8
It was quite an about-face from the OMB’s Open Government
Directive of a year earlier, which called on agencies to “create
an unprecedented and sustained level of openness and
accountability.”9
And the Justice Department began pursuing a criminal
investigation against WikiLeaks, demanding that Twitter turn
139
WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY
over the subscriber account information—including personal
addresses, connections made to and from the account, IP
addresses used, means of payment (though Twitter is free)—
for Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and three other people
who had been involved with the group around the time that
the Collateral Murder video came out: Icelandic MP Birgitta
Jonsdottir, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, and American
anticensorship hacker Jacob Appelbaum. This is an extremely
worrisome development. For there is nothing that WikiLeaks
has done that is diﬀerent from any other newspaper or media
outlet that has received leaked government documents,
veriﬁed their authenticity, and then published their contents
and analysis. If WikiLeaks can be prosecuted and convicted for
its acts of journalism, then the foundations of freedom of the
press in America are in serious trouble.

“We will systematically take on each repressive country that censors its people,” he told Newsweek in August, “We have a list. Don’t piss off hackers who will have their way with you. A mischievous kid will show you how the Internet works.”
But as it turned out, he didn’t have the skills to back up his claims. Though he purported to deal in cryptography, Austin turned out to be nothing but a cipher himself. After Evgeny’s piece for Foreign Policy, the code fell into the hands of Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker of considerable pedigree who had spoken on behalf of WikiLeaks at a US conference in July while Julian was in hiding (and who, for his troubles, was subsequently detained at the airport the next time he flew into the US). Appelbaum’s verdict was unequivocal, delivered via Twitter on 14 September: “Haystack is the worst piece of software I have ever had the displeasure of ripping apart.

But it is sadly typical of Silicon Valley’s outlook.
There are many who still see open source software as a social movement rather than as a part of the commercial world, who believe in the liberating possibilities of open source software, and who cast a baleful glare towards the giants of Silicon Valley.13 For example, in the fallout from the Snowden revelations about NSA spying on the Internet, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum gave a keynote about the surveillance state at the 29C3 (“Chaos Communication Congress”) hacker conference in December 2012 and included this ringing encomium for open source development:
It is possible to make a living making free software for freedom, instead of closed source proprietary malware for cops . . . Everyone that’s worked on free software and open source software . . . these are things we should try to focus on . . .

We talked about how to work around the infamous XCB bug with Java and also about the future of X including OpenGL support.”32
Other hackers, who had hoped to get a significant amount of work done, entirely fail to do so, perhaps because socializing, sightseeing, nightclubs, and the occasional impromptu concert (after fixing an old church organ) prove a greater draw than late-night hacking.
FIGURE 1.5. Hackers on Planet Earth, New York
Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0), https://secure.flickr.com/photos/ioerror/196443446/in/set-72157594211715252 (accessed August 2, 2011). Photo: Jacob Appelbaum.
Most hackers, however, intermix play with hacking, giving themselves ample opportunity to see the sights, dance the dances, play the games, eat the local cuisine, hit the parks and beaches, and stay put with computers on their laps, hacking away next to others doing the same, generally into the early morning.
During hacker cons, there is a semiotic play of profound sameness and difference.

Manning was sentenced by a military judge to thirty five years in prison, and is now at Fort Leavenworth, having spent almost a year in solitary confinement before he was sentenced.5
At the 2010 HOPE conference, there was palpable tension in the air. Rumors were swirling that Julian Assange was going to give the keynote. In a last-minute switch-up, it was not Assange who stepped out on stage, but the American hacker Jacob Appelbaum. Appelbaum gave a riveting talk and effectively outed himself, in front of everyone in attendance (including the inevitable federal agents), as an affiliate of the embattled organization. It was a bold move, given the tactics of silencing, prosecution, and intimidation leveled against the organization by US authorities. His talk contextualized WikiLeaks historically into what is now commonly called “the fifth estate”: the hackers, leakers, independent journalists, and bloggers who serve the critical role that once fell to “the fourth estate,” the mainstream media.